International Safeguards: Summarizing “Traditional” and “New” Measures Matthew Bunn Summary of INFCIRC 153 The traditional IAEA safeguards system for the NPT is laid out in INFCIRC 153, “The Structure and Content of Agreements Between the Agency and States Required in Connection With the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.” The goal of safeguards under INFCIRC 153 is to provide “timely detection” of diversion of “significant quantities” (defined as 8kg of Pu or U-233, or 25 kg of U-235 contained in HEU) of nuclear material from peaceful activities for use in explosives, and “deterrence of such diversion by the risk of early detection.” The basic tools to be used are material accountancy and containment and surveillance. Written at a time when nuclear energy was expected to become a central element of the economies of many states, INFCIRC 153 represents a compromise between those states who sought highly intrusive nonproliferation verification (largely states that would not have been subject to it, such as the United States and the then-Soviet Union) and those who sought to minimize the intrusiveness of the verification regime and its interference with civilian nuclear energy programs. Hence, INFCIRC 153 lays out a regime based primarily on following nuclear material at selected key “strategic points” at declared sites. INFCIRC 153 is replete with provisions designed to ensure that safeguards would not be too intrusive. They are to be implemented in a manner designed “to avoid hampering” technological development, “to avoid undue interference” in civilian nuclear energy, and “to reduce to a minimum the possible inconvenience and disturbance to the State.” The IAEA is not to ask for more from the state than “the minimum amount of information and data consistent with carrying out its responsibilities,” and specific upper bounds are placed on the number of person-days of inspection permitted at various types of nuclear facilities. Under INFCIRC 153, each non-nuclear-weapon state party to the NPT is obligated to accept (and the IAEA is obligated to apply) safeguards “on all source or special fissionable material in all peaceful nuclear activities.” This is specified not to include uranium ore, or any uranium before it reaches the point where it has “a composition and purity suitable for fuel fabrication or for being isotopically enriched.” Safeguards are to cover all source or special fissionable material in “peaceful nuclear activities,” rather than simply all source or special fissionable material, because there is a loophole in the NPT allowing material to be removed from safeguards for use as naval fuel, though this loophole has never been used. Each state with an INFCIRC 153 agreement with the IAEA is expected to maintain a national system of accounting and control that keeps close track of all material subject to2 safeguards, and to provide reports to the IAEA specifying the amount of material in each material balance area for each material balance period. The IAEA’s role is to verify the accuracy of these reports through independent checks on and measurements of a statistical sample of the material reported. For this purpose, IAEA inspectors are to be given access to all declared facilities, although for routine inspections “the Agency’s inspectors shall have access only to the strategic points specified in the Subsidiary Arrangements” for each facility. The IAEA also receives and verifies design information on each facility, to facilitate safeguards on it, and receives reports of imports and exports greater than one “effective kilogram” of safeguardable material. INFCIRC 153 is both more and less comprehensive than its predecessor, INFCIRC 66, which established the pre-NPT safeguards regime. Since INFCIRC 66 safeguards are intended to verify obligations that particular facilities and material are not used for military purposes, not comprehensive nonproliferation obligations such as those in the NPT, its safeguards are focused on the particular facilities and material in question, rather than applying to all nuclear material in peaceful activities, as in the case of INFCIRC 153. But INFCIRC 66 safeguards cover both facilities and material, and are not limited primarily to agreed strategic points, so that for those facilities and materials that are covered, safeguards can be more comprehensive. Moreover, the limits on inspection frequency in INFCIRC 66 allow substantially more intensive safeguards activities. (Unlike INFCIRC 153’s limits on total inspector days, the INFIRC 66 limits are set by numbers of inspections per year, not number of inspector-days, so that in principle each inspection could involve a very large number of inspector-days. Moreover, while INFCIRC 153 allows no more than one-sixth of a man-year of inspection for each reactor or sealed store, INFCIRC 66 allows continuous inspection of any reactor with an inventory or potential production of more than 60 effective kilograms per year (meaning all power reactors, and some large research reactors); similarly, while INFCIRC 153 limits inspection of reprocessing plants to 30 times the square root of inventory or annual throughput (whichever is greater), INFCIRC 66 allows continuous inspection for any reprocessing plant capable of processing more than 5 kilograms per year, a tiny level for such facilities.) In addition to these routine inspections, INFCIRC 153 in principle gives the IAEA the right to carry out “special inspections” at undeclared sites or other areas of declared sites, if the “information made available by the State… is not adequate for the Agency to fulfill its responsibilities.” However, under the system as it actually evolved for its first two decades, the IAEA member states strongly discouraged any such action by the IAEA, and in practice requests for “special inspections” were essentially never made – though the IAEA did carry out some invited “visits” to clarify particular situations. (The recent IAEA trips to suspect locations in Iran, for example, were invited “visits,” not “special inspections.”) Thus, although in principle INFCIRC 153 gives the IAEA legal authority to implement virtually whatever types of inspections it considers necessary “to fulfill its responsibilities,” in practice the document created an environment in which inspectors were politically